Installation of Multiple Window Managers

[gimcrack]

How has your experience been with Pekwm?

Not to mention, I found the following resource for WMs:
https://www.gilesorr.com/wm/table.html

I really like Pekwm. It's a stacking WM, really love the middle mouse click feature. Pekwm is a discontinue project. But it's still good as it stands. Many good webpages with lots of Pekwm tips and tricks. You have to really search for them though. Many themes for Pekwm as well.

For a list of Window Manager I use the Arch WiKi for that.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/window_manager

Enjoy learning and have fun with your experience with each WM you try out.

[smittyvanilli]

Well, I have installed the 3 desktop WMs mentioned and they all seem to work. I have to learn how to use them! I even included others, such bwspm, dwm, herbluftwm, and xmonad. That's a lot of window managers! It is my hope to get experience in all of these, eventually. Productivity in coding and development is my game and I think if one is using much of the shell and using multiple windows / workspaces, one can benefit from using these WMs.

All your responses have been helpful. I'm learning quite a bit already just from having these experiences.

Also, I think I can say that I have "a home", for at least 2 years, including really enjoying the XFCE DE (i.e. home is MX). And I'm sure I'll have more new questions raised based on this fact!

Your start out with to many WM. I started with openbox while I was using Crunchbang. That was my very first experience with a WM. It's been a while before I try out a tiling window manager. I went with i3 and glad I did. Their website has all the info to become very productive with i3. Then I try out bspwm, which is different then i3, which has two config files one are for the keybindings. Took a while to get it going. As it wasn't as easy as setting up i3. Then later on I try out herbluftwm, which was very easy to deal with since I dealt with previous ones. The really different one I try out was dwm. Since you have to recompile every time you make a change. It's not hard to do, it was just different then the others. I'm currently using Pekwm as my window manager. I'm just saying learn one before you move on to the next one. Don't jump around to soon. I mean spend sometime with one window manager and understand it, even try to have a good workflow before moving onto the next one. I like to experiment with other things as well. But I at least understand what is in front of me, before I move one and just carry that experience to the next project.

That's the process I'm doing now. Starting out with Openbox and start to master and tackle that. Many of these others seem to have certain key combinations I don't know about, or just something not in my experience to know what to do! I'm sure many of these WMs out there are powerful once you start to use them. DistroTube on YouTube, which I know many will say he's opinionated, reviews many WMs. He never created a video of which one to start with and so on. One could argue that even some of the WMs he reviews, he many not have the experience to be a master, but he can get around and give his opinion, based on installing them in a VM and working with them for awhile.

Yes, learning / mastering one before the next is something I would enjoy to do. What will one learn by simply hopping around WMs, knowing they have their own way of programming / customizing it?

[smittyvanilli]

If you are looking to learn window managers... remember there are two primary styles:
1. stacking (the more popular)
2. tiling (more on edge due to its less common interface style).

The most popular stacking wm is probably OpenBox (OB). iceWM & fluxbox are close behind. My unofficial ratings.
The most popular tiler is i3wm (and variants).

Most people would recommend you start with some combination of those, I think. Before starting, you might want to investigate the types of wms and see which sounds like a good fit for you and what you want to do. Remember this is linux. You can choose; you can change. But I recommend whatever you do, learn & have fun.

This is a very helpful post to realize and understanding.

For me, I like to be keyboard centered, so Tiling WMs may be better for me, in my case. However, It doesn't hurt to start with something like Openbox and then jump to i3.

By the way, this discussion explains reasons why some users enjoy Tiling Window Managers
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20800978
https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comme ... and_their/
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments ... g/dez3tyc/

For Stacking Window Mangers, I like what one user from that second link stated. To paraphrase it,

Stacking Window Managers allow you to move, resize, minimize, open, select,send-to-workspace, etc... floating windows using the mouse, the same way DEs do, but without all the additional software DEs bring. Many of them have many built-in, often (but not always) configurable keyboard shortcuts, with some tiling capabilities. Good stacking WMs are: 2bwm, Openbox, fvwm, CWM, Fluxbox, JWM, IceWM, PekWM, xfwm, Compiz

Also, i3-gaps looks like something great to check out and later use:
https://github.com/Airblader/i3

Upon discovery, there's also Debian's WIKI about Window Managers:
https://wiki.debian.org/WindowManager

and the following which allowed me to understand even more:
https://www.engadget.com/2012/10/30/how ... ger-linux/
https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comme ... w_manager/
https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comme ... ggestions/

Of course, I can go on and on, however now I have a direction with this and know that I can install window managers at ease, and learn the ones I choose at my own pace!

[tonyB]

How in the world does the startup work in MX19? I keep coming back because its the only modern distro that has not crashed or overheated my laptop. It does work great if you stick with xfce. I was on arch for a week before I realized that for whatever reason arch was not using my fan and I was close to overheating. I got used to the very simple .xinitrc way of doing things. But what is going on here? I patch dwm with autostart diff nothing. Yes its in the correct spot of ~/.dwm. I use awesome autostart.sh nothing. Yes I added the line at the bottom to source it. MX is not respecting much of my configs. Before that I was pulling my hair out trying to make it source my .local/bin. I mean it even has a bit of code to do it that fails miserably. Well I did get that to work after replacing the code and using a .xsessionrc (sheesh). I cannot follow the logic in the startup for other sessions. It makes no sense. Is it the DM? I did not use one on arch. I had a simple tty login and the thing would automatically startx when I input correct password. I can see that the fluxbox autostart has no problems. But that has some magical configuration I cannot figure out why. Seems to me if i start awesome with it calling to the autostart.sh it should autostart.sh. But MX refuses.

Yes I am mostly a noob, only 3 months on linux but am very keyboard orientated. I must use a tiler. I love this distro for many reasons, but for me it has been the hardest one to customize a different session. Absolutely true. Sure I can customize xfce to my hearts content no problem. Anything else...
I cannot do relatively simple things that I have got to work on arch. I am done distro hoping. My laptop likes MX the best. I just want to use a tiler is all. I got a pretty sweet awesome setup and I want the thing to work as expected. I should be clear awesome does work otherwise, just not loading startup stuff. Same with dwm. It is definitely something screwy going on the other end. Its beyond me. Learning Lua or C is easier then figuring the startup.

[eriefisher]

After you install a new window manager or desktop environment you should just be able to log out and before you log back in at the top right of the screen there should be a menu to select the session type. Choose your session and continue to log in.

You mention your on MX-19, I'm on 18 but unless it has completely changed or you changed from Lightdm to some other log in manager it should be accurate.

[tonyB]

Thanks for the reply. That is not the problem. I can login to awesome and dwm. I see the session switcher at the top of login, and use it. However each of these WM have features that allow them to start up some stuff. Like the polkit for example. Or systray icon thingys. With dwm you must patch it with the autostart diff. Then create ~/.dwm and put autostart.sh in it. Awesome is similar but a bit easier with a line of lua at the bottom that points to autostart.sh. One could even just put the lines at the bottom of rc.lua but its easier to have a seperate file and its less typing. I am saying MX does not seem to respect it. I get awesome and thats it. I get dwm and thats it. Won't load up the autostarts. Not even one. Fluxbox has something identical in its folder and works perfectly. Clearly I must be doing something wrong here but it is not with the WM themselves as I had them working fine on other distros. Well arch I mean, the only other one I really tried. I'm just frustrated that I cannot understand why. I realize that DM do things differently than if one does the startx. I don't like it. Cause I don't get it. Needlessly complex I says.

[anticapitalista]

arch is not the same as Debian/MX when it comes to how apps are packaged.

[tonyB]

Thanks for the reply. No doubt that awesome is probably different. But in fact I am using the same exact source code that I used on arch for dwm. I only installed dwm from the package installer to rip off the .desktop file to put it in the xsession place in usr/share. Then I uninstalled it and built it from source. If your using dwm, you probably want to patch it and well, the package manager does not give you the source code or at least I did not see it. Unless you don't know dwm has no regular config. You must change the code and rebuild. That is not the problem. With the both of these, one being built from source and the other from the MX package installer, neither one will load up the autostart scripts that the WM is configured to load. That leads me to believe that the problem is not with them at all or how they are packaged. The problem seems to be with the session manager or something else I don't understand.

[manyroads]

@tonyb dwm is not really very hard to work with and is quite popular on debian. I have published a how-to guide here (but beware it is on an arch-based distro. I'm pretty certain it would work here).

https://eirenicon.org/dwm-learning-how- ... ice-setup/

[tonyB]

Manyroads! I will check out your link. I have read your other article about bspwm. Good stuff but I tried awesome and it was over. I just like it more. Only forcing myself with dwm cause I'm learning C in my freetime.